Ren Powell's Blog, page 9

Approaching a Venn Diagram of Poetry and Theatre

I cooked last night. Salted cod, kale, mashed cauliflower, roasted beets and garlic. I made dukkah, and feta cream-cheese with lemon zest.

After nearly a week of feeling ill, this was good. After literally years of not enjoying cooking, not being creative in the kitchen: this is great.

I am a cook. I am not a cook.

Fever gone, I’m heading back to work today. I’ve had several nights of bad dreams, which I’m choosing to use as a lens to examine my real insecurities.

I think that my interests are changing. It’s not that my passion is waning, but it is shifting direction. I keep fighting the desire to know that this time I will uncover it: my authentic calling. Goo to clearly-identifiable butterfly. Finally.

I remember being crushed when I read about how Robert Frost was very protective of his reputation. Of his image. I remember thinking that if even he is not good enough in his authentic shapelessness, who is?

How can one live in a body and view it simultaneously? Every mechanism for that reveals at least one, inherent distortion. Even the smoothness of a baby’s skin is an illusion of uniformity. The truth will out. Of not under a magnifying glass, then with age.

We have a new curriculum point in the rehashed version of what used to be primarily Theater History. It is about the theatricalized self. And while I am still uncomfortable with the inclusion of this subject in the classwork, I am fascinated by it.

The whole idea seems to lie in a realm between psychology and performance studies. While the education department has basically dumbed-down the academic requirements, it has ramped-up the quasi-philosophic elements. I think it attempts to turn the arts into a soft science.

When I first began teaching, I did impose a lot of my subjective perspectives on the students. I thought I had the life experience and the wisdom to interpret things correctly. If not correctly, certainly as a (implied: the more) “valid” conclusion. I have no doubt that I unintentionally played the guru of theatrical interpretation, as had so many of my instructors before me.

At some point, I began moving away from that. I try to keep my precious insights out of the classroom: “Just the facts, Mam”, and Devil’s advocate. This kind of humility has made me a much better teacher. It’s also left me with the freedom to continually question my own perspective. I think this is when I really began/begin learning.

‘Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.’

W.H. Auden

I do agree with the concept behind the new curriculum goals, with their focus on continual learning rather on the absurd goal of “mastering” something that will always be subjectively evaluated.

But I am still at a loss in term of how to evaluate this kind of thing. It still begs the question of there being a linear progression to learning itself, and that someone somewhere sits with an unequivocal conclusion, measuring the distance crossed by each student.

It still puts lines down and says: this peg in this hole.
This perspective.
This association taints it all, so throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Maybe the arts will never find a real home in academics? After all, don’t all good mentor-ships require rebellion? Shouldn’t every living have the freedom of shapelessness?

I am not going to worry about all this for a while. I have exams to compose.

An Argument for Amorphous Stories

Every Brilliant Thing is categorized as a documentary. It’s actually a filmed stage production based on a book. A memoir. It touches on bipolar disorder and suicide. (Well, it points to it at any rate.) The film is streaming on HBO, and what I spent an hour or so of my sick leave watching this week.

It reminded me of Ross Gay’s Book of Delights in terms of what I assume was the story’s intention. But it also reminded me of Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself. Complete with celebrity audience members credited in iMDb.

DelGaudios film, in which DelGaudios plays himself, rates 8.2/10 on iMDb. Duncan Macmillan’s film, in which an actor portrays the protagonist, 8.4/10.

Both feature a form of role-playing with the audience in an almost quasi-therapeutic position. The attentive listener. The empathetic community. Both protagonists serve up their parent’s fallibility and the evolution of their personal coping mechanism.

Sharing with us. And letting us play along in character.

One review of Every Brilliant Thing describes the play as “exploring mental illness.” Yeah. I saw a lot of storytelling, but little exploring.

This morning I read an article in The New Yorker titled Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds. It’s about a philosopher whose entire career is centered around her experience of marriage and divorce. She publicly ruminates about both. In light of historical ideas, I would presume. She examines her own learning-process as an adult. Her shock at her own naivete in the face of a second waning love story. I have so many mixed feelings about exploring these things with the interviewer who was exploring them with Callard.

We tell our stories and risk being called “brave”, which is sometimes intended earnestly, but often a euphemism for breaking social norms of exposure. It’s a passive-aggressive rebuke. We’ll be applauded and mocked. Definitely judged. The comments on the Facebook post were scathing. And nearly without exception unrelated to the contents of the actual article.

In his film on visual comedy, Rowan Atkinson said that character always comes down to a half an inch off the cuffs. I am taking this out of context, but yes. You need to recognize the subtle difference between sexy and slutty. Heroin chic or heroin addict. And your crafted performance will be perceived as character.

I read somewhere that the the social elite invited Rimbaud to one of their soirees. He stood on a chair and shook himself to rain lice down over all on them. (I do think my memory is adding details here: the chair, not the lice.) They fell out of love with him then.

Only for a while because, like everyone does, he died. Once someone is dead you can pin down a story and no one can let you down or force you to deal with it in the present tense.

Head lice, a bloody gun wound, a severed ear, a water-logged corpse, all quite romantic if you don’t have to smell them. Mouches (French for flies) were fashionable as long as they were a bit of play-acting: a bit of self-irony for the syphilitic over-class. The problem is that self-irony can’t help but be self-conscious. I will damn myself before you damn me, and before I am actually damned.

Flies are gross. And I have to admit that the thought of them buzzing around me to get at an actual wound on my body is nearly intolerable. There is a fascinating logic in taking on the costume piece mouche. It’s like a form of Neo-Classical LARP-ing! Cathartic.

I’m not claiming to be making keen observations here. Not by any stretch. How many movies fetishise the seedier sides of life and death? We play out our wildest fears as though bringing them to some kind of life will exorcise them from our future. Nothing new here.

Stueren: the Norwegian word for what is considered appropriate conversation in the drawing room – at least that is my take on the cultural connotation of the word: appropriate for a drawing room. And when we dress-up our naked stories with feathers and bells we can call it burlesque, and giggle a little. Call it a soiree and read our nonsense poems and strain our hallucinogens through sugar cubes poised on beautifully crafted spoons.

Definitely heroin chic, at least as a historical anecdote.

What is whispered over the the smell of Tide in the laundromat is another story. Literally.

I once read reviews of one woman’s memoir about the sexual abuse she suffered as a kid. One reviewer said that the descriptions of the sex acts were too graphic, and questioned the author’s motives. Another described the passages as titillating. Also questioning the author’s motives. “Why is she telling this story?”

Some real things are nearly impossible to place in an appropriate space. Or nearly impossible to dress-up appropriately for the space at hand.

Every Brilliant Thing really is a thing with feathers. It offers hope. And in a very earnest way, it is a brave thing to offer. Especially since the brilliant things the author logged for so many years saved no one. And there is no reason to believe it will save anyone. There is a naked truth. The bit up under the skirt.

The author as the theatricalized self. Is it even possible for the author not to do so? Is it possible for any of us not to do so?

I can say that what moves through these live performances is not the same beast that moves through a real group therapy session.

It demands more from you than a bit of role-playing and applause. What moves among the people there has no feathers at all. No bells. It’s amorphous. It demands from you the ability to sit with something undefined.

And that is just fine. It’s not fit for the drawing room, or the theater, but it is fine.

I know next-to-nothing about narrative psychology. But I am not entirely convinced that being guided away from exploration and into construction is always a good thing.

Life stinks sometimes. And sometimes it smells like tide, sweat-soaked quarters and machine oil. Is the point of our lives to bang the elements of it into a performance as we go along?

Callard’s second husband is an expert on Socrates. If I met him, I’d ask him if Socrates meant that the examined life was only worth living if certain plot lines were drawn and feathered?

D3, Sharp at the Edges

I am sitting at the desk. Slight fever. The space heater’s white noise is filling the room. And I notice myself hum. On the exhalation. A single note. And again. Hum.

It’s a D, according to the app on my phone. Too sharp to be properly flat.

It’s as though white noise invites more noise. I used to sing when I vacuumed. I’d forgotten that. “I’m on top of the wo-orld, looking _ down on creation…”

Down by another pill today. Just another two weeks before my moods are entirely my own again. This week B. chastised me (gently) for hiding my speedy days from her all these years. I guess it is because these days she has no choice in the matter. I recognize the ambivalence of needing to be seen and knowing there may be something to hide – something right around the corner at the end of a sentence. Something you don’t see coming until it’s too late.

There is so much uncertainty around whether this or that social filter is functioning, and which are okay not to worry about, with whom. But I don’t have an added pressure that she has: of thinking there is so little time left.

Now. And then never.

It’s fascinating that context really determines everything. Even what is “considerate” behavior. I would have been more considerate perhaps to let her have my manic days as a touchstone for unconditional love. To allow her to have demonstrated it, maybe especially to herself, since I have felt shame, but never fear.

I think I have spent most of my life wanting do-overs. I take that backs. There is the dark side of all the therapy. How can you reframe this and that? How can you find a brighter perspective? Not that anything was ever your fault. You are responsible for your response. But don’t over-think it. Think it differently, though.

Self-absorbed is an amazing metaphor really. A tendril of sponge consuming another tendril of sponge on the sea bed. It is a zero-sum game, really.

Sea sponge is structured like a jelly sandwich. They are described simultaneously as “masters of survival” and as “threatened species” today.

Fun facts.

Too Proud to Ask – or – On Ambition

Because I forget too often. And I cry when I remember
taking note of the all the days slipped by
and still I’m unable to acknowledge this imperfect bowl
of my own making

or what has been tossed into it by passers-by
by prophets, by bricklayers
like medieval poets

or what has landed here – no
there – like a maple tree seed spinning
then haphazardly taken root

growing at a pace that is so slow
I know I won’t live to see the greenware crumble
at a hatching
of something meaningful

“Make a list of all the things that are pleasure in life, and them make an art form of one of them. It’s not a way of making a living. It’s a way of making a life.” – Paulus Berensohn

At the wrong moment any little bit of wisdom sounds like a platitude. I know that. I was talking to B. last week and told her that I blame the French philosophers (or my reading of them) for making me believe that cynicism was a hallmark of intelligence, and that professional criticism was anything less than a hypocritical denial of sincere ambition.

I don’t think I used those words.

I have to play a podcast every night to keep myself from ruminating while I try to sleep. Listening to folklore – murderers and other monsters – is somehow more soothing than introspection. Who knows. Maybe the subconscious comparison is comforting.

Paulus added the “us” to his given name. He took on the extra syllable without apology. He unashamedly admitted that he wanted to be the monk who raises his hand and says remember – remember the hand.

Mary Oliver wrote that she wanted to ask him to make her a begging bowl.

Who asks to be asked. And who acknowledges the question with a question?

A Relay-Race

Rosemary oil is for memory. And the little blue electric light on my desk tries
to make up for the season’s darknesses.

That’s not a typo.

A man lashes out because he can’t escape himself
while I can’t find myself.

I’m not afraid of curses anymore: I’ve stopped apologizing.

I’ve emptied my pockets of posies – for some of us
it never was what we half-desired
it to be from the distance of our daydreams, linking us backward
in search of a future significance – and some of us

have emptied our pockets of withered violets
and of stones, too.

The academics get it all wrong. No season takes its leave peacefully
Conscious or not
The melting ice buzzes like the fat bee seeking shelter under the leaves
in the yes/no of late winter
like a fat bee caught under a Kilner jar at the waning edge of summer.

I slip off the beaked mask and I dare to touch the purple bodies
of the Amethyst Deceiver
which as the season ends is easily confused
with the deadlier Lilac fibrecap.

I hand one off to the furious runner
and I utter the truth that will catch up with him

when I finally find myself
deep under the soil
ever-reaching forward

Thank you, Richard.

Done with Genres

Memories are so unreliable. I can’t remember how I learned about travel destinations, or about diseases before the internet. How did I get through high school or college and what exactly did access mean then? Was there a time when I knew how to read a map?

My reading then was indiscriminate. Scholastic book club picks, swap-meet bin grabs, the Fireside Theater play-of-the-month. Tally’s Terra Nova still sits on my shelf. As does Hayes’ Gift of Joy. Smithsonian magazine had the most incredible photographs. National Geographic, haunting articles. The man who lived in our garage paid me to clean his room. He had Playboy magazines scattered over the floor. So there was that, too. My influences were unintentionally post-modern, which I belief actually means nothing more than un-curated.

I had no idea what I wanted to be. No singular passion. I have no singular passion.

We’d move and then we’d move and I would have a new name. Like a new book that never quite takes hold of the imagination, this little narrative gets tossed aside. Break a new spine. Nothing fits inside the lines once it takes on a life of its own. I mean, life itself is transgressive, right?

Sometimes I wonder if when we breath in, bits of the world gets lost in our bodies and move us around like ghosts under bed sheets. And we rationalize sometimes.

We can glide.

Mr. Shannon told me to put the pencil on the paper and then never look down again. Draw exactly what you see. He never explained himself. But I still believe sensitivity of the line is far more interesting than the perceived gesture. I think of Schiele and how he stripped his work of the ornamental influence of his teacher Klimt. I’m not considering Schiele’s narrative, mind you, but his lines which are a translation of sensation. Touch – with the eyes opened and closed at the same time. Much later, in college, a professor told me that the trouble with my drawings were that the parts didn’t work together to create a whole.

Maybe that was my unconscious goal. Parts are potentials and prompts and promise, the whole is as inescapable as a closed circle.

When I run, sometimes I close my eyes for dangerous seconds. I listen to the soft snap of twigs on the trail. How would one draw that? How would one translate the sensation that is simultaneously a drop in the pelvis and a rise in the chest? And a hatch-working of browns. And there is a smell in the foreground. Moss-greens, sticky translucent sweets.

That things can smell sweet may be the first order of synesthesia.

Yesterday, the air temperature barely above freezing, and a fat bumble bee attempted to fly. It sounded like death and I will argue that is synesthesia not simile.

There is pleasure in the unfocused life. There is discovery.

I have been thinking this morning that the internet is actually a closed circle. That my influences are more curated than ever, shaped by algorithms and consumer-economy necessity. My thousands of connections intelligently whittled down to a dozen or so assumptions that I don’t understand, and like even less.

I am Narcissus staring at my reflection, not liking it, and not able to walk away because if I can’t see myself, who will see me? And how will I know if what they see is accurate? Have you seen the flipped perspective of your face? There is no right answer, I’m afraid. But then: why look?

Is change even possible in a closed-form?

I watch the people pass by on the train platform. At 7 a.m. At 2 p.m. on my way to the doctor’s office, I may as well be in another country. Faces pass by. Context or content?

One more headline presupposing causation over correlation. A website wants to know if I am a “health professional” before allowing me to access information. Twelve more influencers slipped into my feed for me to measure myself against. A 91 year-old woman pulls the loose skin backward from her face and says she hasn’t had surgery but would love to be rid of this. And yes, pulled taut, she is freakishly youthful in the video clip. I have never looked that young.

But part of me really does wonder why that would be/should be something I would desire. I used to want to look as mature as I felt. Here is a rabbit hole of unavoidable self-loathing and self-denial. A young colleague dumps the details his CV into every conversation. Something in my gut swells with unlabeled feelings, like bed sheet ghosts moving me through the rest of the day.

I think I should write another book. A series of proper essays for publication. Shape things for a demographic that might give a shit. See themselves, in a niche.

But what I have here is a notebook of lines that I have been drawing with my eyes closed. And in certain contexts they look like words.

Cracks in My Knowledge

These vacation weeks always seem to slide by, and I think that is fine. I’ve moved almost easily through the days and taken advantage of the sunshine for a change. Leonard’s muscles are stiff from the long walks to the lake and back, but he is smiling. My muscles are sore from the morning rehab exercises. I move from downward dog into wild thing and every fiber of my being screams, oh, god, no!

I’m tucking in sheep cheese and slathering my shoulders with Ibux gel and hoping for the best. I’m reading pubmed articles about nutrition and wondering about the quality of a study that begins its abstract with the word “Nowadays”.

“My mind is clearer now. At last, I can see…”

There are songs popping up in my head. I haven’t heard songs in my head for a very long time. There is a lightness in everything right now. Even my frustrations seem like loosely tangled threads: not knots to numbly work around.

I forgot two days of medication and that made me feel like a bad patient. I am supposed to be weaning myself s.l.o.w.l.y. Tuesday night I lay ruminating about something I did at work that I should have handled better. Found myself shrugging it off. I am not perfect. More to the point – it is also just fine that I never will be.

It is time to let myself be moved on.

I have been talking- well, listening lately to B talk about community. She is exploring now – out loud – what kinds of compromises it demands. There is a part of me (a very large part of me) that believes that compromising is giving in to the oppressor. A form of toxic self-effacement. I am learning that there are other ways to look at it. There are so many other ways to maintain one’s integrity.

Better late than never.

B sees God in other people, without mysticism, she says. Whereas if I have seen god it has been through the disembodied word that arrives in a letter or a book, or a poster on the subway. All mysticism, really: a vague or ill-defined religious or spiritual belief, especially as associated with a belief in the occult.

Another definition of mysticism: belief that union with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender. Emphasis is mine.

How can contemplation and self-surrender co-exist? Doesn’t contemplation require critical thinking, which is an activity of the ego? Isn’t this a paradox?

The last time I went to a Quaker service, a porcelain doll propped in a Shaker chair began gesturing towards me. I cannot surrender my critical mind. There is a world too unreal that will take hold in the flung-wide, open open – with no footholds, no analytical scaffolding.

Still (and thank god) my contemplation is riddled with cracks, and here is how the light gets in or so wrote Cohen once – or at least he wrote something similar.

My human, animal nature is as integrous as is the wild, imperfect river that flows and shifts chaotically. The past marks the banks with a written record of what was and an illusion of what might have been. And even this is a distraction. Everything is as is meant to be. Nothing is broken. Even as it ends.

Leonard wades belly-deep in the water and drinks. I worry for a moment about summer’s green algae despite the thin ice that rings the reeds at the surface of the lake. I should have worn my sunglasses. The light is sharp. Cold. I turn my back to feel the warmth of it through my jacket. I frame a duck in the camera lens. On the phone’s screen. This correction is just another distraction.

The shutter opens, the light gets in, the depth of focus is set. Here is this little slice of life for your consideration. Contemplate.

How do you eat an elephant? (E. loves dad jokes.)
Bite by bite.

Eat it mindfully. What does that even mean? Here are words that link, fragile as a daisy chain, back to the blinding light that can overwhelm a person with its shimmer. Because everything inanimate becomes animate in the heat, so nothing ever really makes sense.

My childhood, being driven through the desert time and time again, was measured by mirages. Like the lives of books that open and close. Under the covers at night, with a flashlight and story, your own breath threatens to suffocate you.

I’ve wondered if an egg hatching in the nest gives off fog the way my breath does as I walk among the trees. I’ve wondered, but I’m learning that I would actually rather not know all of the facts.

I’ve added a photography club meeting to my calendar. Maybe there is some kind of compromise I can make here. I wanted to sit zazen, after all.

“Till Sick for Good.” Maybe Not.

I am realizing that I don’t always have to be the one who attempts to accommodate everyone else’s preferences, social or otherwise. I can stop beating myself up for not succeeding at this, for not being what everyone else wants or expects.

(I know this sounds banal to many. I know I sound like a teenager, in which case it is definitely not banal but should be a lesson learned long ago.)

This realization a big deal is because when I stop thinking it is my role to appease everyone else, I am able to see that people sometimes work to accommodate me and my weird but comfortable habits.

And that is just fine. They can do that kind of bending, too.

I don’t need to feel guilty. Or assume I am being patronized. Yeah, sometimes I am being patronized, but it is what it is.

It just is.

I have no idea how any culture designates its spectrum of normal, but I am convinced that there is an immutable spectrum of self-awareness that is tightly bound to, parallel to, the spectrum of pity to compassion.

When I dare to admit to my own unpleasant eccentricities, what my boss at work calls aspects of a “big personality” (which is weird, since I feel so fu*king small), without lathering them in shame or denial, I can actually begin to see that other people aren’t perfect either – not it terms of their own definition and not in terms of mine. I can see that there is no reason for me to force myself to try to be more like them (caveat: not without first questioning whether what they are presenting is something I actually admire).

When I don’t feel censured or inadequate, I don’t feel a need to judge other people for not being who I want them to be. Expect them to be. Behave, that is. It is what it is – but it is their behavior, not the who of them. Nor the who of me.

Accept and move on. Accept and avoid when necessary. No big deal. No need to try to control the uncontrollable others by way of compliance.

I could write a poem about the lessons of childhood. About making ourselves sick in the attempt to be good. What are we supposed to be good for? good at?

Sometimes I think we are all tin wind-up toys toddling in a room, banging into one another until we are effectively unwound. Then for some reason, we wind ourselves up again heading into a meaningless competition. A bully jabs two fingers into your sternum and asks: What are you going to do about it?

I could write a poem about the sharp edges of tin toys.

B. assures me that, yes, I am weird. But to be fair, I kinda opened myself up for that one.
L. says I seem tired.

This is me, at 56, embarrassed that I’m not writing this at 17. I’m concerned I will forget again all that I’ve learned about my own integrity. I am integrous. Weirdly integrous (And I have learned just now that this is a word.)

This is the who of me, though not always the behavior.

I try.

“First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.”

Samuel Beckett

On the Cusp

There is something called a nocebo effect: it happens when someone is convinced that a medication is going to have a negative effect.

I don’t think there is a word for what I have now. I am weaning off the medications and feeling more energetic than the weaning would realistically afford. Maybe it is just hope.

The weather has not improved. No good news coming in my inbox. But still, I seem to have a new perspective on things. I feel something much smaller than ambition, but there are gears turning again, propelling me forward with a sense of identity.

I think I remember being this.

I hear buzzing from a mason wasp’s pot. It resonates in my chest. In a good way – because moving outward from here is a field-full of purple heather, and beyond that the woods, where the songbirds are about to return.

Another Word for Practice

E. has slept in a half-reclining position on the couch for 3 nights now. I am grateful I got a flu shot this winter. Though I’m honestly a little resentful that he can nap during the day.

I also use it as an excuse to feign frustration over not being able to do morning yoga in the living room – ignoring the fact that there is plenty of room in the house to accommodate Warrior 3.

Yeah, I am not doing as well as I would like in terms of my compassion meditation and practice. I’m not doing all that well in terms of my – what? – serenity practice?

Lately I have been getting stuck on words like “practice” when they pop up in my mind. I’m looking for a way to make all the blah blah rhetoric mean something to me personally, when I keep having knee-jerk responses to words like practice and journey again and again. It is a bizarre distraction.

I’ve even looked up the word practice and all that I lay into that word isn’t there in the denotation. When I was a kid I would practice the flute. I would spend afternoons (trying to find ways of getting out of) practicing tap dance routines, and plies. Practice in my mind is inherently connected to expectations of improving, mastering: moving towards an eventual performance of some sort. So part of me still bristles at the phrase yoga practice, meditation practice. It is a personal connotation that is absurdly difficult for me to get past. I feel a pressure that there will be a judgement made by someone sometime in the future.

After a few weeks of after school dance lessons, I wasn’t allowed to go with my friends anymore. I didn’t practice enough, my mother said. At 6 or so, I wasn’t showing enough commitment to justify the expense. I kind of get it. Knowing what I know now about the tripwire of sudden poverty and all that. But I took her at her word then. I believed I’d let her down. I wasn’t the kind of person who could work hard enough to be good at something. Not good enough to justify the effort.

My step-father called me chubs and laughed at me when I tripped over my own feet. We take on identities that are difficult to shed – even knowing what we learn over the years about the fallibility of the people who handed them to us.

When I ran in my twenties, I tripped often: an ankle half-turned on every run. In my forties, I swapped the clunky platform runners to run barefoot. I’ve tripped maybe twice in the past decade. I need to be closer to the earth.

The GP yesterday told me she strongly discourages me from having cortisone shots in my shoulders. The pills have triggered me in the past, and can do so in people who don’t even have a bipolar diagnosis. She fears the shots will do the same. This means my shoulders will continue to hurt in most yoga poses and transitions. It means moving into a table top will continue to make my head want to explode. It means that my current “practice” isn’t about improving my performance.

If yoga means to yoke our consciousness to the universal (in a way that releases us from the matter of our consciousness), then maybe this degeneration of my performance is actually fine. Acknowledging that since there never was an apex of mastery, it is fine. Nothing is incomplete or failed.

This Aristotelian curve we crave to find in the telling of our “journeys” is just part of the matter of consciousness. There is no journey. Not for me, anyway. I find the term too weighty with expectations.

I am wandering.

These mornings are about discipline, not practice as I understand it. I think discipline is more difficult because there is no promise – no potential – no performance.

This morning is all about relishing the perceived gap in praxis between a word like discipline and and a word like wandering.